For international enterprises that provide customer websites in many different languages, the process of keeping all of the enterprise's sites updated with timely and accurate translations can be challenging and time consuming. Many companies with a multinational customer base will operate a primary site, with text in the language of the country where the company is located, and several other sites in other languages that contain translated versions of the contents of the primary site. Information about new company products or services, new features for existing products or services, or new promotional offers and marketing campaigns needs to be translated and incorporated in a timely manner, as appropriate, into the company's various sites.
In addition to the usual issues encountered in any translation effort, such as dealing with variations in sentence structure, grammar, vocabulary, gender, and cultural differences, several additional factors come into play when trying to maintain timely, relevant, and accurate translations across multiple different language sites in a web environment. For example, a significant number of company employees from different functional areas or departments within the company may be involved in contributing or editing the text content of the sites, site content may change rapidly, some content may be applicable to all international sites while other content may be applicable to only some countries, and so forth. Similar problems are encountered in connection with email content if the company also conducts international email marketing campaigns in support of its product offerings.
Further contributing to the challenge of performing and maintaining multiple language translations in a web environment is the fact that a typical web page is rendered from many relatively small elements having text content combined with the markup language instructions controlling the positioning and rendering of the text by the browser of the user's computer. Providing translators with individual markup language text elements for translation is known in the art, but a translator presented with a short amount of text out of context may not understand or appreciate the overall use of the text within the larger page, possibly resulting in an incorrect translation. Also, the various ways in which text may be encountered are typically handled by different or independent techniques, potentially resulting in delays and inconsistencies. For example, text appearing in marketing emails, text appearing in text elements on the web site, and text embedded in images may all be handled by a different process and with different tools.
Known prior art techniques for managing translations do not provide a comprehensive translation workflow system that fully addresses the issues arising from maintaining multiple similar translated websites. Commercially available tools for translation project workflow are known in the art, but these tools typically are not well adapted to the translation of web sites and emails into multiple languages. They often contemplate dealing with the translation of entire documents or relative large blocks of text, not the relatively small markup language elements typically encountered in frequently updated web pages where a large number of frequently changing products and services are marketed. Prior art tools also typically anticipate a centralized management and communication approach that does not fit well with a company employing a diversified web content editing process where content editing capability and authority is distributed among multiple organizations.
There is, therefore, a need for computer-implemented systems and methods that provide multi-language web site translation task scheduling and management.